This obsession with the national image was part of why Brazil’s leaders wanted to host the Olympics in the first place. In 2009, when Rio won the bidding to hold the Games, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then the country’s President, hailed it as proof that “Brazil has left the ranks of second-class countries and turned into a first-class country.” The economy was booming then, and the Olympics seemed to present a chance to challenge the old refrain that “Brazil is not a serious country”—a jab that Brazilians commonly (but wrongly) attribute to Charles de Gaulle. As proud as they are of samba, Carnival, and futebol, Brazilians hoped to show the world that their country has a lot more to it.
This feeling has a name in Brazil: complexo de vira-lata. Literally “mutt complex,” the term conjures a stray dog begging for scraps. It was coined during another international sporting event in Rio, the 1950 World Cup, when Brazil’s national soccer team lost to Uruguay and it seemed as though the country had thrown away its best chance to demonstrate its greatness to the world. But the phrase also hints at a deeper, more noxious insecurity, over the racial makeup of the country, and the unresolved legacy of slavery. In the nineteenth century, Brazil’s leading minds believed that the way to achieve progress was by “whitening” the population with European immigrants. Then, as now, the élites saw their country in the same league as the United States and Europe, and only rarely compared it to others in Latin America.
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